Monday, July 28, 2008

Sharks have invaded the office... There is a battle between product management and engineering over who can build the best shark with frickin' laser beams. (Spoiler: engineering wins, with real lasers.) The latest challenge includes irritating the turtles in the fountain with a self propelled shark... we'll see if joat can pull it off!

And, podcasts!.. Adam has kicked off an official-un-official Emergent podcast. ;) He and Dan Amerson ramble away about Gamebryo 2.5.

Monday, July 14, 2008

E3... blah blah, some things that jumped out for me from the Microsoft news:

Netflix on 360 - This has been speculated on for some time, but it's great to get the official word. It seems clear to me that the future of entertainment delivery will be along the lines of IP cable, streaming movies, etc. The next few years we'ss see the battle between the console providers, cable companies, probably phone companies as well.

Install to HD - A great feature, since the 360 is so loud while spinning a disk. Most games are doing this to some extent under the hood anyway, so why not just copy the whole thing? Sadly, you still need the disk in to boot... I'm looking forward to the disk just being a high bandwidth way to download, and then tossing it.

- He also mentions an approach I'll be presenting on ind detail at Gamefest 2008 - software command buffers - with the con of "Difficult to update dynamic resources efficiently in parallel due to API", quite true

Software rasterization for occlusion testing

- low rez floating point buffer, renders 100 meters of low-poly occluder meshes, limited to a max of 10,000 verts. Use on all platforms